I've been an obituary writer, a journalist, a copy editor, a PR pro, a strategist, a market research junkie, a blogger, a social media enthusiast and raconteur, among many other things throughout the last 19 years. My favorite role, however, has been leading and working collaboratively with strong teams to achieve impressive results in content and communications, especially where digital rubber meets the marketing road. By day, I oversee security strategy and portfolio marketing for Cisco. By night, I often try to share with others what I learn. I can be found most often on Twitter at @mediaphyter.

Unified, a new enterprise marketing technology company, will today introduce what it calls a Social Operating Platform (SOP), designed for large brands and agencies who need better automation and management of paid and owned media campaigns. Unified’s approach is simple. Its SOP is a platform for managing advertising across different social channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and open web social networks and mobile platforms. Here’s where it gets interesting: it goes far beyond just managing those programs.

“Paid advertising is a feature of a much larger platform, and our Social Action Engine allows us to turn CPC/CPM marketplaces into CPA campaigns, allowing advertisers to buy engagement at scale,” said Dave Donohue, vice president of marketing for Unified.

With so many social media management tools, one might ask, why is this innovative? This is a trick question. Unified is not another social media management tool. Unified has created an emerging new market within social business that addresses the gap where social media and social advertising intersect. In fact, while doing recent interviews for a feature on social media monitoring and measurement, one of the most common pains was the lack of streamlined communications, ROI quantification, and measurement for the impact and success of social advertising.

There are three main contributors to the pain of social media advertising:

It is growing exponentially, but management is not keeping up with the demand and marketers need to prove value, stat.

There’s also no intelligent control of measuring, promoting or influencing advertising via social media. And, the “fun” of it all is wearing off. It needs to be treated as any other measurable business function.

And, while there are enterprise options for social conversation, there are no existing visionary options for enterprise management of social advertising. So, large brands have been forced into very manual, laborious and flawed processes for managing their paid media while, ironically, the free social programs have been managed with more robust systems.

Unified claims to address all of this by bringing the enterprise scalability and architecture into social advertising, the foundation of which breeds measurement and quantification solutions that address the other pain points. The company focuses solely on social platforms, so no current integration with search or Google AdWords, but it does do just about everything else. Critical to those needing to show lead conversion from social ad programs, the SOP integrates with Marketo, Salesforce.com or any ERP/CRM platform through what Unified calls dataSYNC technology that gives different options for pulling data in and out of the pipeline. Its API can also be used to manage data coming in and out of Radian6 or PeopleBrowsr monitoring programs, too, so it enables a convergence of multiple social business programs. All of this allows the brands, and the digital agencies managing the brands, to scale smartly and strategically.

“We allow advertisers to buy everything on a performance basis, but we also give them the capabilities to quantify their earned media value through our proprietary Earned Media Action (EMA) framework,” Donohue said. “We have been delivering over 40 cents on the dollar of free media for every dollar spent through our platform.”

Unified was founded in 2011 and has been running largely in stealth since then, with 20 employees and offices in San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles. The company has presented a healthy paid beta program, with brands such as Cadbury, BMW, General Electric, DreamWorks and Fisher Price signing on. One beta user, Microsoft, has gone as far as to call Unified a “trusted partner” for its media programs.

“Our social success is driven by cutting-edge strategy and access to the market’s most innovative and successful technology. Social, mobile, and emerging media are absolutely critical to that success,” said Marty Collins, Director of Emerging Media, Microsoft. “Since Unified’s founding it has been a trusted partner of ours.”

Pricing for Unified starts at $300 per seat per month for its audienceACTIVATOR dashboard, which allows for planning, buying, optimization and measurement. A percentage of media spend purchased through the platform is charged when its social action engine quotes CPA prices. There are additional pricing models, but according to Unified, all social engagement generation, EMA tracking, and data storage is included when users buy the various layers of the SOP.

Let’s face it; trying to manage a social advertising program is a bit like driving a clown car – lots of moving parts, hard to control and a large margin for human error. With enterprise marketing technology applied to social advertising, Unified has created a space to watch.

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